Can Germans understand the speakers of the other Germanic languages?

 

Chris Ebbert

Senior Lecturer in Industrial Design, Mid Sweden University

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Industrial- and Transportation Designer, innovation professional, lecturer, researcher; lived here and there and done this and that. Harmless, unless there is food involved. I appear to have what I call chronic innovation disorder; show me what you will, I will have a better idea.

My one big passion in life is to uphold the flag of high civilisation. Smaller passions include cats of all sizes, American vintage cars, obtuse movies, photography, and musing randomly on social media.

As a speaker of High German, I would rank the extent to which the other Germanic languages are commonly understandable as follows:

• Dutch, 40%; to me, Dutch sounds a bit laboured, as if the speaker is trying to speak while also eating an entire mouthful of baked potatoes; but it is peppered with things that sound so clearly German every now and then that it makes me jump;
• English, 10%; English, when I first heard it, sounded very soft and curiously frog-like. The 10% overlap are more on paper than in spoken words, because the pronunciation is very different, except for things like house (= Haus), mouse (= Maus), etc;
• Swedish, 10%; here, a strange thing is going on; maybe it’s just me, but when I first heard and read Swedish, I was overwhelmed by how many words are actually identical with German ones, and what’s truly weird is: the ones that aren’t still make total sense to me. Like, skog (= Wald). I can not explain this, but there is something oddly intuitive even about Swedish words that have absolutely zilch similarity with German ones. It’s as if some kind of Germanic, ancient memory is revived or something; the way the language sounds though makes it hard for an unprepared German speaker to get it, because Swedes “sing” their words very melodiously, and that melody has nothing at all to do with the words themselves, so it sounds all like the Elves from the Lord of the Rings; 

• Norwegian, 10%; so similar to Swedish, I am sometimes unsure which of the two I am hearing; there is a curiously “uppity” quality to Norwegian that makes it sound like they are somehow making one extraordinary point after another;
• Danish, 10%; again, similar - but this time, entirely in written form, because the pronunciation is so soft and even slurred that it gets really hard to distinguish any recognisable features.